Posts by PeterKelly:
- They will feel the unrestrained fury of the Pakistan armed forces. There havealways been links between Pakistan’s security services and the Taliban, but in targeting the children of soldiers the Taliban has abandoned what remains of these links. The military response will be swift and overwhelming, bearing none of the restraint it once had.
- The political elite will be forced to abandon their sympathy for the group. They will not hold back the will of the part-independent military in its revenge, and will lose public backing for expressing sympathy for the fight of the Taliban against western oppressors. Their condemnation will release the military to act as it wishes.
- Anti-US sentiment will drop, if only moderately, as backing for the Taliban drops with it. Both these shifts will be small publicly, as those who back the group generally despise the military. However, both will be enough to hurt the Taliban’s recruitment efforts. As they lose hundreds more in the military response to come their operational numbers will fall dramatically.
- Pakistan-Afghan-US military cooperation may increase for the first time. Should this happen the Taliban’s days as a military force are numbered. They have been saved by their ability to operate cross-borders whilst their opponents do not. If this balance shifts they will be incapable of holding on to their mountainous territories.
The Taliban: You Reap What You Sow
December 18th, 2014
By Peter Kelly.
The Taliban has hurt the only power to protect it for decades
Today, on 16th December 2014, the Taliban made the most tragic and devastating error since 21st September 2001. On that date thirteen years ago their representatives chose to defy the US rather than enforce the eviction of 9/11-planner and Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. They did so in the face of international condemnation and a hostile UN Security Council, the first and last time the Americans would be written a blank military cheque by the international community.
Thirteen years ago their error in judgement resulted in the end of their control over Afghanistan and loss of the Afghan civil war. A war that, until that point, they were winning. Despite expressing their regret and sadness for those killed in the twin towers attacks and wish for Bin Laden to leave their borders they responded to an aggressive United States with defiance and threats.
Only one thing saved them from eradication in the years following, the protective shield of the Afghan border with Pakistan. The Taliban was created by Pakistan and they were protected by it. In the lawless wilderness of the federal North West, alongside the border with Afghanistan, they thrived. From their safe haven they launched an insurgency across Afghanistan, less intense and violent than that in Iraq but no less resilient and eroding.
As the US continued to turn its back on Palestine, invaded Iraq, let loose their Private Military firms and left Guantanamo Bay open, they were losing the war of hearts and minds. The ranks of the Taliban swelled, branches such as the Haqqani Network became deadly and influential forces in their own right. As Al Qaeda faded from the world stage the Taliban lost nothing of their grip over the border regions. They thrived under the lacklustre eye of the Pakistani military and a political elite torn between control over their state and the important strategic shield the Taliban represented against a NATO and Iranian-dominated Afghanistan and a bargaining chip against the West.
This shield has shifted very little in the last decade. The military has grown less tolerant, more aggressive in its attempt to stamp out the Taliban’s stronghold in the mountainous regions. But every time they took territory the Taliban took it back, every time they killed scores of militants scores more joined them. Nothing changed.
That changes today.
Today the Taliban carried out an attack barbarous even by their standards, a horrific display of debased morals and desperate violence. This month the Pakistani military has killed hundreds of their number in a concerted campaign, and their response has been to massacre children. Over a hundred school children slaughtered in an attack the militant group has attempted to explain as revenge.
No attempt at denial, no sympathy or sorrow. Nothing of the moderation which tampered their response to 9/11. They have committed a grave error, one which may well lead to their end.
The children they have killed are the children of soldiers, of the local community. They are not westerners, they are not members of another religious group. They are Pakistani Muslims of the very groups that the Taliban draws its recruits. The impact of this tragedy will be widespread:
The Taliban has been waging a war won not with guns, but with minds. By winning the moral high ground over the imperialistic oppressors of the West they have recruited young men in their thousands, a never-ending stream of new members which has made them impossible to beat.
In today’s massacre they have abandoned that high ground. They have betrayed the people who defend them, they have targeted the innocent and challenged the military to strike back with force they have never before wielded. Today’s tragedy is the most significant mistake made by any Islamist militant force in over a decade. In sowing nothing but sorrow to Pakistan they will in turn reap their own.
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Crimea and The Hypocrisy of the Nation States
March 26th, 2014By Peter Kelly.
Revolution in Ukraine has seen the fall of a democratic President
This week Crimea declared independence from Ukraine and applied to join Russia, a move rejected by almost every western state and acknowledged only by Russia and the few nations still under its sphere of influence. Today Putin signed the treaty accepting Crimea as part of the Russian federation, deaf to the protests of the west.
The people of Crimea see their nation seized by an opposition they do not support, an opposition filled with right-wing “bandits” that violently tore down their democratically elected president and took hold of parliament. They see a state which is no longer their own and which cannot represent them any longer. With this in mind they have broken away to join a state which they feel cares for their interests. They have exercised their right to self-rule, they have exercised democratic choice, and yet they are condemned.
The number of separatist nations within the old boundaries of nation states is growing, and they are growing bolder. Scotland, a constituent nation of the United Kingdom, goes to the polls this year to decide on independence. Wales follows it and voices in Northern Ireland and Cornwall are becoming louder.
In France Brittany, Corsica, Basque Country and Catalan areas are increasingly vocal in opposition to a highly centralised French state which operates on an official policy of denial that any French citizen may not wish to be French. Spain faces separatists in Catalonia demanding the right to choose their future even as the Basque country turns to peaceful methods to drive for independence and Galicia and Valencia take their confidence from more strident neighbours. Belgium, the centre of the European Union, seems prepared to at any moment divide straight down the middle.
These nations join several decades of separatists which have succeeded in their mission, and many which have failed. South Sudan, the Yugoslav nations, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, East Timor, Namibia, Transnistria and Eritrea all have declared independence from larger nation states which sought to keep hold of them even as the Czech and Slovak republics divided peacefully. On the other side of the spectrum the brutal wars in Chechnya and Kurdistanwhere a people’s fight for self-rule has dissolved in the face of brutal suppression by the older nation states.
The fact is that almost all the nation states are hypocrites on the topic of both democracy and self-rule. The United Kingdom have defended the Falkland’s right to decide their rulers and legitimised the Scottish referendum but have denied the similar claims for self-rule of the Eastern European states falling under Russian influence. France campaigned the hardest of all of NATO to defend the rights of revolutionary Libyans but until very recently banned minority languages within their own borders and still refuse to acknowledge strong separatist groups invoking their democratic right to choose their future.
Russia has defended to the last the rights of the Georgian breakaway states but fought to prevent the secession of Bosnia and brutally suppressed the people of Chechnya. The United States, so proud of its own efforts to overthrow a colonial ruler (over essentially a tax dispute), will not step close to the recognition of any new state which claims Russia as a backer. Spain claims it has moved on from the dictatorship of Franco but seems set to deny the rights of a powerful region’s wishes to rule itself separate from the shockingly incompetent arm of Madrid.
Democracy is not a cherry-picking exercise. You cannot defend the people’s right to be free of dictatorial government on the one hand and then dictate that some of your own people must be ruled by you whether they like it or not with the other. You cannot promote human rights and freedoms abroad and yet refuse to let go of a nation of people which has had enough of your rule and permit them to enjoy their own freedoms.
A people’s right to choose their fate does not stop when it reaches the point of questioning old borders drawn out by forgotten empires interested only in lining their own pockets. Those empires may have fallen a century ago but they are responsible for the on-going conflicts in Iraq and Syria, in Libya and Ukraine, in the Pyrenees and Sudan. Their arbitrary lines drawn across continents based only on what their guns could defend are not fit for the purpose of defining the nations of today. Governments should not be permitted to dictate whether or not a nation remains under their rule based only on their capability to keep them suppressed by coercion. That is the forgotten politics of the dictatorships of empires and deserves to be resigned to the catacombs of history together with the institution of slavery and the failed attempts at National Communism.
Separatism is a choice, a choice which is as valid under a democratic system as voting for your head of state. Choosing who you are to be ruled by includes choosing who you are to be ruled with and who you wish to share this responsibility to choose with.
Rather than outright condemning the separatism of Crimea because it may damage the strength of a developing ally for the benefit of a competitor, the west ought to respect the democracy they claim to hold so dear by concentrating on ensuring the people’s choice in Crimea is fair. Send electoral observers, give advice on the next steps forward, and stop openly driving a people away from a democratic Europe with a startling but hidden hypocrisy which makes the openly oppressive ambitions of Russia look so tempting.
The west’s outright refusal to provide anything but condemnation of the country’s decision to separate from the Ukraine has prevented them from doing anything which could have helped the process and protected democracy – instead leaving Crimea to its own devices in a referendum which, though it may be popular and is very possibly a reflection of democratic opinion, was largely a sham. Russia has branded them hypocrites and the truth in those words leaves the West toothless in the face of upheaval. Their inability to do anything but misrepresent the conflict as “pro-EU is good, pro-Russia is bad” has significantly damaged their ability to have any positive impact on the post-revolution Ukraine.
Once upon a time the nation state was defined by how much territory a government could control using the point of bayonets and the flare of cannon fire. That time has passed, and it is about time the nation states of old stood aside and permitted peoples to choose their path with the free will that democracy assures them.
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With Friends like These – The Implosion of the Right and Left
January 14th, 2014By Peter Kelly.
In October this year a resurgence of the American Tea Party drove the US government to a halt. Thousands of federal employees were sent home on unpaid leave, hundreds of services came to a halt, and park rangers had to break federal law just to search for lost hikers on state property. But this was just round one. Round two was just around the corner – the threat to follow up government shut-down by forcing it to default on its debts and plunge the United States into recession just as it reached recovery.
The Republican Party has been dragged to this point not because it actually wants to do so, but because electoral politics have forced it to. The Tea Party have placed cocked guns against the heads of those more pragmatic members of the American right, threatening that should they oppose the largest political blackmail attempt in American history they will face active Tea Party campaigns and candidates against them in the primaries. Primaries that without the support of the Tea Party they would probably lose.
Threaten your own government with financial collapse, or be torn from your seat in government. Your choice.
This ability of the most radical elements of the Republican Party to coerce more moderate elements into striking a more radical stance makes the entire US right-wing unelectable. The government shutdown completely backfired and yet Republican leaders such as Speaker Boehner were completely unable to back out without giving up their seats to Tea Party primary candidates. Exactly the same thing happened in the 2012 election. On paper Barack Obama faced enough opposition that any moderate Republican candidate should have won. However, every single Republican primary candidate was forced to spend the vast majority of the campaign cycle proving their radical-right credentials. Doing so meant abandoning the moderates and independents of America, and therefore abandoning the election.
Exactly the same thing is presently happening in the UK. Tired with the Conservative Party taking a somewhat moderate line and actually compromising with their Liberal Democrat partners to permit such progressive concepts as equality of marriage to progress – recent times have seen the emergence of the UK’s own Tea Party – UKIP. UKIP effectively destroyedConservative control over the local government landscape in local elections this year by launching campaigns against Conservative candidates who actually supported nearly the same positions as they do. The knock-on effect was the creation of a huge rebel group of right-wing backbenchers in government, who’s rebellions have driven the coalition government to embarrassing defeats to Labour and to made alienating suggestions such as reintroduction of national service and compulsory singing of the national anthem for school children. By driving the Conservatives right UKIP will lose them the centre-ground which won them the 2010 election. By challenging them in their own territories UKIP will destroy the right-wing electorally and so (ironically) making it significantly less likely that any of their own policies will take shape.
The right-wing is not unique to suffer from this infighting crisis. The left is just as plagued, but it faces a very different kind of radical rebel. Rather than forming their own political parties to challenge from further left disenchanted liberals are instead simply not voting at all. Claiming “they’re all as bad as one another” and spending far more time attacking those on their own wing for not being left-wing or liberal enough than attacking those on the right-wing for continuing to propose and drive right-wing policies.
These cynical rebels (generally young, middle-class, educated persons) used to form the leadership of the UK Labour Party and US Democrats, and the mainstay of the voting demographic of the Liberal Democrats. They lash out at the political parties on their own wings for being not angry enough, not radical enough, too white, too male, too rich, and too cautious. They’re elitist, misogynistic and out-of-touch.
Unfortunately however, they’re also the only bulkhead of left-wing liberalism in politics.Starved of votes and support they have struggled for years to impact a far better organised and unified status-quo centre-right in politics which spawned the successive governments of the New Labour and One-Nation Conservative governments in the UK. They have been forced to compromise more than they would want to and give more concessions to the right because their own potential supporters are far more interested in expressing their anger at the whole political elite than supporting making a difference. In this respect the British left have a lot to learn from the American left, who by-and-large continue to rally behind a president whose foreign policy is a great deal more right-wing than they’d like – simply to hold off the significantly more right-wing future which awaits should a Republican sit in the oval office.
This ‘angry-left’ lash out at anything which is seen as reinforcing the oppression of the elite against the weak, even if it’s a huge step better than what came before. Anti-war protesters hate Obama for his drone campaign despite its impact to dramatically reduce the number of civilian casualties in the war on terror and being significantly better overall than boots on the ground. Radical feminists lash out at allies and moderates with as much aggression as they do the truly misogynistic. The British Liberal Democrats have been wholesale abandoned by their supporters for their compromises to their Conservative partners despite their efforts to force an increasingly reactionary party to remain in the political centre. Both governments have been attacked for not doing enough to jeopardise their own finance and services industries in the name of bringing the fat-cat bankers to account – despite their actions to bring more comprehensive regulations to bear whilst also saving their nations from economic collapse. So keen are they to attack the oppressive elites that some will strike unsavoury alliances with far worse just to get a swing in.
The enthusiasm in which those on the right and left go about attacking the more centrist of their own side of the political spectrum could not be more self-defeating. In these relatively stable and peaceful times for the US and Britain no dramatically right or left wing faction is likely to ever control the legislative or executive of either state. The only way to win an election is by one wing of politics seizing control of the centrist, moderate and independent votes, doing so requires some degree of political compromise.
But the radicals of both wings do not understand compromise. The idea of anything less than absolute freedom from federal government interference in personal economics for the right, or anything less than complete dedication to immediate equality of all for the left, is completely alien to them. Anyone who believes in compromise, or whose political opinion lies on some kind of scale, is doomed to be attacked by those on their own wing with far more ferocity than those who are their more natural opponents across the aisle.
If activists on either side of the political spectrum truly believe in furthering their cause, and not just the ability to express their emotion as violently as they see fit, they must learn to compromise. They must learn to lend support to candidates who support some of their positions, if not all; or those who support their causes, but not to the same extent they wish they would. They must learn that small steps in the right direction are better than steps backwards or no steps at all. They must understand that a vote for the party most similar to their perspective is the best way to have that perspective heard and that sometimes tactical voting is better than a vote against your own side. They need to understand the basic psychology which makes explaining things to people and discussing things with them far more effective than shouting at them.
It may not sound like the utopia they want, it may not seem like a big enough leap away from the world which has fueled their fury against the status quo, but it’s a big enough step to matter. It’s a big enough step to be better than nothing at all. Because right now, with friends like these, everyone’s the enemy